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1 month ago | 
wsj.com | Karen Wilkin
New YorkWhat is conjured up by “Weimar Republic”—the democratic government of Germany between 1919 and 1933, the fraught years between the nation’s defeat in World War I and its takeover by the Nazi Party?
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1 month ago | 
msn.com | Karen Wilkin
Continue reading More for You Continue reading More for You
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1 month ago | 
wsj.com | Karen Wilkin
Los AngelesOn Sept. 19, 2011, the front page of the Boston Globe featured a painting of a nude man, seen from behind, toweling off. The paper stressed that the Boston Museum of Fine Arts was deaccessioning works to acquire the “Impressionist masterpiece,” noting its importance and rarity. “Every great museum in the world would want this picture,” the MFA’s director said. The painting?
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2 months ago | 
wsj.com | Karen Wilkin
New YorkIn 1924, J.P. Morgan Jr., known as Jack, opened his late father’s private collection to the public as the Pierpont Morgan Library. Its first director was Belle da Costa Greene (1879-1950). She had been Pierpont’s librarian from 1905 until his death in 1913, although the term, Greene’s preferred, seems inadequate to her deep knowledge, acute eye, fine negotiating abilities, and—yes—meticulous cataloging skills.
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Jan 14, 2025 | 
newcriterion.com | David Yezzi |Eva Resnikova |Karen Wilkin |Sarah Ruden
Fiction: Lawrence Venuti and Michael Wood on Dino Buzzati’s The Bewitched Bourgeois, at McNally Jackson Books at the Seaport (January 16): In the fall of 2023, our fiction critic, Andrew Stuttaford, commended to readers a new translation of Dino Buzatti’s Il deserto dei Tartari (1940), now issued as The Stronghold—a shadowy, suggestive novel about life in a frontier garrison that may have been “[a]n oblique response to Kafka’s The Castle.” That volume’s translator, Lawrence Venuti, and...
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Jan 13, 2025 | 
newcriterion.com | David Yezzi |Eva Resnikova |Sarah Ruden |Karen Wilkin
It’s often said that an immortal monkey, sitting at a typewriter with no deadline and jabbing at random, will eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare. For a human being who speaks English, this ought to take somewhat less than forever. An Elizabethan or Jacobean playwright, in turn, is natively proficient in early modern English and knows the work, and possibly the man, well. He may have cowritten a play or two with Shakespeare, and some of the Bard’s stuff, he feels, is really his.
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Jan 13, 2025 | 
newcriterion.com | David Yezzi |Eva Resnikova |Sarah Ruden |Karen Wilkin
Yesterday, Igor Levit returned to Carnegie Hall, as he does frequently—as all great musicians should, I think. Carnegie Hall should present the best, regularly. But this does not always work out. For the reasons, consult industry insiders (who do not include me). Arcadi Volodos has not appeared in Carnegie Hall since 2003. Grigory Sokolov, since 1975. Like Igor Levit, they are Soviet-born pianists. You can see all three at the Salzburg Festival every summer.
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Jan 10, 2025 | 
wsj.com | Karen Wilkin
Grand Rapids, Mich. From 1940 until his death in 1965, David Smith lived and worked in New York’s Adirondacks, high above Lake George. In his last decade and a half, when his steel constructions increased dramatically in size, he arranged them in the fields outside his house and contemplated them against the wooded landscape.
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Jan 9, 2025 | 
newcriterion.com | Sarah Ruden |Eric Gibsom |Karen Wilkin |Anthony Daniels
I will put the bottom line in the first line: last night’s concert by the New York Philharmonic was very good. First-rate. What makes a first-rate orchestra? Personnel, of course—but the conductor too. First-rate personnel plus a lesser conductor equals . . . a concert a little gray, maybe? The Philharmonic was conducted last night by Daniele Rustioni, a Milanese born in 1983.
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Jan 8, 2025 | 
newcriterion.com | Sarah Ruden |Karen Wilkin |Anthony Daniels |Eric Gibsom
Last night, the New York Philharmonic was conducted by Kevin John Edusei, a German born in 1976. He cuts a dashing figure onstage: shaven head, trim physique, long coat, in the old style. Does it matter, what a conductor looks like? No—but there’s an element of theater in the concert business. The program began with a work by Samy Moussa, a Canadian born in 1984. I will discuss this work later—in a chronicle for the print magazine.
